"'The CIA made a historic mistake in
encouraging Islamic groups from all over the world to
come to Afghanistan.' The US provided $3 billion for
building up these Islamic groups, and it accepted
Pakistan's demand that they should decide how this
money should be spent, Harrison said."

I disagree. The creation of Islamist
terrorist organizations by the CIA has been a key part of
U.S. policy, first in attacking the Soviet Union, and
since then in an on-going war against Russia and the
countries of the former Soviet Union and against
Yugoslavia.

As the following article from the
'Washington Post' shows, Washington was no distant
financier of the Afghan terrorists, unaware of how its
money was being spent. Rather, it controlled the action.
Today, Washington publicly condemns Islamist terrorism
but this is two-faced for at the same time Washington and
its partners continue to create, support and manage
Islamist terrorist and related groups (for instance, the
'Kosovo Liberation Army' terrorists). For Washington,
organized terror is a weapon of Empire. - Jared Israel.

Anatomy of a Victory: CIA's Covert
Afghan War

By: Steve Coll, 'Washington Post', July 19, 1992

A specially equipped C-141 Starlifter transport
carrying William Casey touched down at a military air
base south of Islamabad in October 1984 for a secret
visit by the CIA director to plan strategy for the war
against Soviet forces in Afghanistan. Helicopters lifted
Casey to three secret training camps near the Afghan
border, where he watched mujaheddin rebels fire heavy
weapons and learn to make bombs with CIA-supplied plastic
explosives and detonators.

During the visit, Casey startled his Pakistani hosts
by proposing that they take the Afghan war into enemy
territory -- into the Soviet Union itself. Casey wanted
to ship subversive propaganda through Afghanistan to the
Soviet Union's predominantly Muslim southern republics.
The Pakistanis agreed, and the CIA soon supplied
thousands of Korans, as well as books on Soviet
atrocities in Uzbekistan and tracts on historical heroes
of Uzbek nationalism, according to Pakistani and Western
officials.

"We can do a lot of damage to the Soviet Union,"
Casey said, according to Mohammed Yousaf, a Pakistani
general who attended the meeting.

Casey's visit was a prelude to a secret Reagan
administration decision in March 1985, reflected in
National Security Decision Directive 166, to sharply
escalate U.S. covert action in Afghanistan, according to
Western officials. Abandoning a policy of simple
harassment of Soviet occupiers, the Reagan team decided
secretly to let loose on the Afghan battlefield an array
of U.S. high technology and military expertise in an
effort to hit and demoralize Soviet commanders and
soldiers. Casey saw it as a prime opportunity to strike
at an overextended, potentially vulnerable Soviet empire.

Eight years after Casey's visit to Pakistan, the
Soviet Union is no more. Afghanistan has fallen to the
heavily armed, fraticidal mujaheddin rebels. The Afghans
themselves did the fighting and dying -- and ultimately
won their war against the Soviets -- and not all of them
laud the CIA's role in their victory. But even some sharp
critics of the CIA agree that in military terms, its
secret 1985 escalation of covert support to the
mujaheddin made a major difference in Afghanistan, the
last battlefield of the long Cold War.

How the Reagan administration decided to go for
victory in the Afghan war between 1984 and 1988 has been
shrouded in secrecy and clouded by the sharply divergent
political agendas of those involved. But with the triumph
of the mujaheddin rebels over Afghanistan's leftist
government in April and the demise of the Soviet Union,
some intelligence officials involved have decided to
reveal how the covert escalation was carried out.

The most prominent of these former intelligence
officers is Yousaf, the Pakistani general who supervised
the covert war between 1983 and 1987 and who last month
published in Europe and Pakistan a detailed account of
his role and that of the CIA, titled "The Bear Trap."

This article and another to follow are based on
extensive interviews with Yousaf as well as with more
than a dozen senior Western officials who confirmed
Yousaf's disclosures and elaborated on them.

U.S. officials worried about what might happen if
aspects of their stepped-up covert action were exposed --
or if the program succeeded too well and provoked the
Soviets to react in hot anger. The escalation that began
in 1985 "was directed at killing Russian military
officers," one Western official said. "That
caused a lot of nervousness."

One source of jitters was that Pakistani intelligence
officers -- partly inspired by Casey -- began
independently to train Afghans and funnel CIA supplies
for scattered strikes against military installations,
factories and storage depots within Soviet territory.

The attacks later alarmed U.S. officials in
Washington, who saw military raids on Soviet territory as
"an incredible escalation," according to Graham
Fuller, then a senior U.S. intelligence official who
counseled against any such raids. Fearing a large-scale
Soviet response and the fallout of such attacks on U.S.-Soviet
diplomacy, the Reagan administration blocked the transfer
to Pakistan of detailed satellite photographs of military
targets inside the Soviet Union, other U.S. officials
said.

To Yousaf, who managed the Koran-smuggling program and
the guerrilla raids inside Soviet territory, the United
States ultimately "chickened out" on the
question of taking the secret Afghan war onto Soviet soil.
Nonetheless, Yousaf recalled, Casey was "ruthless in
his approach, and he had a built-in hatred for the
Soviets."

An intelligence coup in 1984 and 1985 triggered the
Reagan administration's decision to escalate the covert
progam in Afghanistan, according to Western officials.
The United States received highly specific, sensitive
information about Kremlin politics and new Soviet war
plans in Afghanistan. Already under pressure from
Congress and conservative activists to expand its support
to the mujaheddin, the Reagan administration moved in
response to this intelligence to open up its high-technology
arsenal to aid the Afghan rebels.

Beginning in 1985, the CIA supplied mujaheddin rebels
with extensive satellite reconnaissance data of Soviet
targets on the Afghan battlefield, plans for military
operations based on the satellite intelligence,
intercepts of Soviet communications, secret
communications networks for the rebels, delayed timing
devices for tons of C-4 plastic explosives for urban
sabotage and sophisticated guerrilla attacks, long-range
sniper rifles, a targeting device for mortars that was
linked to a U.S. Navy satellite, wire-guided anti-tank
missiles, and other equipment.

The move to upgrade aid to the mujaheddin roughly
coincided with the well-known decision in 1986 to provide
the mujaheddin with sophisticated, U.S.-made Stinger
antiaircraft missiles. Before the missiles arrived,
however, those involved in the covert war wrestled with a
wide-ranging and at times divisive debate over how far
they should go in challenging the Soviet Union in
Afghanistan.

Roots of the Rebellion

In 1980, not long after Soviet forces invaded
Afghanistan to prop up a sympathetic leftist government,
President Jimmy Carter signed the first -- and for many
years the only -- presidential "finding" on
Afghanistan, the classified directive required by U.S.
law to begin covert operations, according to several
Western sources familiar with the Carter document.

The Carter finding sought to aid Afghan rebels in
"harassment" of Soviet occupying forces in
Afghanistan through secret supplies of light weapons and
other assistance. The finding did not talk of driving
Soviet forces out of Afghanistan or defeating them
militarily, goals few considered possible at the time,
these sources said.

The cornerstone of the program was that the United
States, through the CIA, would provide funds, some
weapons and general supervision of support for the
mujaheddin rebels, but day-to-day operations and direct
contact with the mujaheddin would be left to the
Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence agency, or ISI. The
hands-off U.S. role contrasted with CIA operations in
Nicaragua and Angola.

Saudi Arabia agreed to match U.S. financial
contributions to the mujaheddin and distributed funds
directly to ISI. China sold weapons to the CIA and
donated a smaller number directly to Pakistan, but the
extent of China's role has been one of the secret war's
most closely guarded secrets.

In all, the United States funneled more than $ 2
billion in guns and money to the mujaheddin during the
1980s, according to U.S. officials. It was the largest
covert action program since World War II.

In the first years after the Reagan administration
inherited the Carter program, the covert Afghan war
"tended to be handled out of Casey's back pocket,"
recalled Ronald Spiers, a former U.S. ambassador to
Pakistan, the base of the Afghan rebels. Mainly from
China's government, the CIA purchased assault rifles,
grenade launchers, mines and SA-7 light antiaircraft
weapons, and then arranged for shipment to Pakistan. Most
of the weapons dated to the Korean War or earlier. The
amounts were significant -- 10,000 tons of arms and
ammunition in 1983, according to Yousaf -- but a fraction
of what they would be in just a few years.

Beginning in 1984, Soviet forces in Afghanistan began
to experiment with new and more aggressive tactics
against the mujaheddin, based on the use of Soviet
special forces, called the Spetsnaz, in helicopter-borne
assaults on Afghan rebel supply lines. As these tactics
succeeded, Soviet commanders pursued them increasingly,
to the point where some U.S. congressmen who traveled
with the mujaheddin -- including Rep. Charles Wilson (D-Tex.)
and Sen. Gordon Humphrey (R-N.H.) -- believed that the
war might turn against the rebels.

The new Soviet tactics reflected a perception in the
Kremlin that the Red Army was in danger of becoming
bogged down in Afghanistan and needed to take decisive
steps to win the war, according to sensitive intelligence
that reached the Reagan administration in 1984 and 1985,
Western officials said. The intelligence came from the
upper reaches of the Soviet Defense Ministry and
indicated that Soviet hard-liners were pushing a plan to
attempt to win the Afghan war within two years, sources
said.

The new war plan was to be implemented by Gen. Mikhail
Zaitsev, who was transferred from the prestigious command
of Soviet forces in Germany to run the Soviet war in
Afghanistan in the spring of 1985, just as Mikhail
Gorbachev was battling hard-line rivals to take power in
a Kremlin succession struggle.

Cracking the Kremlin's Strategy

The intelligence about Soviet war plans in Afghanistan
was highly specific, according to Western sources. The
Soviets intended to deploy one-third of their total
Spetsnaz forces in Afghanistan -- nearly 2,000 "highly
trained and motivated" paratroops, according to
Yousaf. In addition, the Soviets intended to dispatch a
stronger KGB presence to assist the special forces and
regular troops, and they intended to deploy some of the
Soviet Union's most sophisticated battlefield
communications equipment, referred to by some as the
"Omsk vans" -- mobile, integrated
communications centers that would permit interception of
mujaheddin battlefield communications and rapid,
coordinated aerial attacks on rebel targets, such as the
kind that were demoralizing the rebels by 1984.

At the Pentagon, U.S. military officers pored over the
intelligence, considering plans to thwart the Soviet
escalation, officials said. The answers they came up
with, said a Western official, were to provide "secure
communications [for the Afghan rebels], kill the gunships
and the fighter cover, better routes for [mujaheddin]
infiltration, and get to work on [Soviet] targets"
in Afghanistan, including the Omsk vans, through the use
of satellite reconnaissance and increased, specialized
guerrilla training.

"There was a demand from my friends [in the CIA]
to capture a vehicle intact with this sort of
communications," recalled Yousaf, referring to the
newly introduced mobile Soviet facilities. Unfortunately,
despite much effort, Yousaf said, "we never
succeeded in that."

"Spetsnaz was key," said Vincent
Cannistraro, a CIA operations officer who was posted at
the time as director of intelligence programs at the
National Security Council. Not only did communications
improve, but the Spetsnaz forces were willing to fight
aggressively and at night. The problem, Cannistraro said,
was that as the Soviets moved to escalate, the U.S. aid
was "just enough to get a very brave people killed"
because it encouraged the mujaheddin to fight but did not
provide them with the means to win.

Conservatives in the Reagan administration and
especially in Congress saw the CIA as part of the problem.
Humphrey, the former senator and a leading conservative
supporter of the mujaheddin, found the CIA "really,
really reluctant" to increase the quality of support
for the Afghan rebels to meet Soviet escalation. For
their part, CIA officers felt the war was not going as
badly as some skeptics thought, and they worried that it
might not be possible to preserve secrecy in the midst of
a major escalation. A sympathetic U.S. official said the
agency's key decision-makers "did not question the
wisdom" of the escalation, but were "simply
careful."

In March 1985, President Reagan signed National
Security Decision Directive 166, and national security
adviser Robert D. McFarlane signed an extensive annex,
augmenting the original Carter intelligence finding that
focused on "harassment" of Soviet occupying
forces, according to several sources. Although it covered
diplomatic and humanitarian objectives as well, the new,
detailed Reagan directive used bold language to authorize
stepped-up covert military aid to the mujaheddin, and it
made clear that the secret Afghan war had a new goal: to
defeat Soviet troops in Afghanistan through covert action
and encourage a Soviet withdrawal.

New Covert U.S. Aid

The new covert U.S. assistance began with a dramatic
increase in arms supplies -- a steady rise to 65,000 tons
annually by 1987, according to Yousaf -- as well as what
he called a "ceaseless stream" of CIA and
Pentagon specialists who traveled to the secret
headquarters of Pakistan's ISI on the main road near
Rawalpindi, Pakistan.

There the CIA specialists met with Pakistani
intelligence officers to help plan operations for the
Afghan rebels. At any one time during the Afghan fighting
season, as many as 11 ISI teams trained and supplied by
the CIA accompanied the mujaheddin across the border to
supervise attacks, according to Yousaf and Western
sources. The teams attacked airports, railroads, fuel
depots, electricity pylons, bridges and roads, the
sources said.

CIA and Pentagon specialists offered detailed
satellite photographs and ink maps of Soviet targets
around Afghanistan. The CIA station chief in Islamabad
ferried U.S. intercepts of Soviet battlefield
communications.

Other CIA specialists and military officers supplied
secure communications gear and trained Pakistani
instructors on how to use it. Experts on psychological
warfare brought propaganda and books. Demolitions experts
gave instructions on the explosives needed to destroy key
targets such as bridges, tunnels and fuel depots. They
also supplied chemical and electronic timing devices and
remote control switches for delayed bombs and rockets
that could be shot without a mujaheddin rebel present at
the firing site.

The new efforts focused on strategic targets such as
the Termez Bridge between Afghanistan and the Soviet
Union. "We got the information like current speed of
the water, current depth of the water, the width of the
pillars, which would be the best way to demolish,"
Yousaf said. In Washington, CIA lawyers debated whether
it was legal to blow up pylons on the Soviet side of the
bridge as opposed to the Afghan side, in keeping with the
decision not to support military action across the Soviet
border, a Western official said.

Despite several attempts, Afghan rebels trained in the
new program never brought the Termez Bridge down, though
they did damage and destroy other targets, such as
pipelines and depots, in the sensitive border area,
Western and Pakistani sources said.

The most valuable intelligence provided by the
Americans was the satellite reconnaissance, Yousaf said.
Soon the wall of Yousaf's office was covered with
detailed maps of Soviet targets in Afghanistan such as
airfields, armories and military buildings. The maps came
with CIA assessments of how best to approach the target,
possible routes of withdrawal, and analysis of how Soviet
troops might respond to an attack. "They would say
there are the vehicles, and there is the [river bank],
and there is the tank," Yousaf said.

The first antiaircraft systems used by the mujaheddin
were the Swiss-made Oerlikon heavy gun and the British-made
Blowpipe missile, according to Yousaf and Western sources.
When these proved ineffective, the United States sent the
Stinger. Pakistani officers traveled to the United States
for training on the Stinger in June 1986 and then set up
a secret mujaheddin Stinger training facility in
Rawalpindi, complete with an electronic simulator made in
the United States. The simulator allowed mujaheddin
trainees to aim and fire at a large screen without
actually shooting off expensive missiles, Yousaf said.
The screen marked the missile's track and calculated
whether the trainee would have hit his airborne target.

Ultimately, the effectiveness of such training and
battlefield intelligence depended on the mujaheddin
themselves; their performance and willingness to employ
disciplined tactics varied greatly. Yousaf considered the
aid highly valuable, although persistently marred by
supplies of weapons such as the Blowpipe that failed
miserably on the battlefield.

At the least, the escalation on the U.S. side
initiated with Reagan's 1985 National Security Directive
helped to change the character of the Afghan war,
intensifying the struggle and raising the stakes for both
sides. This change led U.S. officials to confront a
difficult question that had legal, military, foreign
policy and even moral implications: In taking the Afghan
covert operation more directly to the Soviet enemy, how
far should the United States be prepared to go?

Emperor's Clothes does not charge a
subscription fee. But of course nothing is free.

We rely mainly on volunteer labor.
Nevertheless there are plenty of bills. For example, the
cost of Lexis, our search engine, has doubled. Lexis is
the best method of rapidly locating news stories from
several thousand sources over the past twenty years. It
is probably the best political research tool ever
available. But now it costs twice as much.

We rely on our readers for contributions.
If you like what we're trying to do, please help.